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In today’s constantly changing business environment, IT infrastructure decisions have never mattered more. According to findings from the IBM Global Data Center Study , only 21 percent of organizations have highly efficient IT infrastructures and are able to devote more than 50 percent of their IT budgets to innovations like cloud and big data. So how can all organizations reach the peak of infrastructure efficiency? The key is an agile, flexible and scalable foundation to support the growth of game-changing technologies like cloud, mobile, social and big data.
IBM has made announcements that address the needs, challenges and opportunities organizations face in the midst of ever-growing market changes. We’re bringing together industry-leading expertise for the best enterprise-class infrastructure for cloud, big data and analytics capabilities.
We’re remaking enterprise IT for the new era of cloud
Did you know 24 out of 25 best performing companies in the world rely on IBM’s dynamic private and hybrid clouds to optimize their social, mobile and big data workloads? By tapping into today’s cloud announcements, clients can:
Respond to business opportunities while reducing IT operational costs . New products expand the IBM PureSystems Solutions portfolio, offering 33% faster solution delivery and 37% lower cost of deploying cloud solutions
Manage infrastructure at... [Continue Reading]

We are moving towards the "New Era of Smarter Computing " and we need to transform our business model and culture to gain competitive advantage.
So what is this “New era of Smarter computing” we are talking about?
This is the era where businesses react with speed and flexibility with shorter deployment times, manage infrastructure with predictive analytics and drive more sales with open standards to achieve reduced operational costs, optimized utilization and better customer experience.
Now the question is, what is inhibiting us to more to new era of computing?
Firstly all the businesses are cutting cost over IT expenditure for maintenance and administration, Secondly, limited access to data when and where required and thirdly, our resistance to move beyond our traditional silos infrastructure.
With all these inhibitions, how to move to New era of Smarter computing?
We need to move to infrastructure that is
Defined by software that can automatically assign workloads to resources,
Designed for big data for instantaneous insights for competitive advantage
Open and collaborative to protect the investment.
If you want to learn more about overcoming the inhibitions of moving to “ New era ” and achieve a business model with efficient and agile infrastructure please join IBM's leading expert at the following... [Continue Reading]

How can organizations accelerate sales cycles and improve client relations leveraging software defined?
Having spent the majority of my career in IT infrastructure and Telecommunications network sales and management, I understand the importance of accelerating sales cycles, increasing forecast accuracy and establishing longer lasting client relations. The Forrester study “ Defining the 21st Century Sales Person ” highlights the dilemma facing today’s sales organizations embattled to find new clients, increase pipeline, increase sales and revenue growth. Lengthy sales cycles are one of the factors that drive rising Sales, General and Administrative (SG&A) costs.
At the same time, salespeople are the proverbial hamburger in between the bun, being driven to increase sales effectiveness, while clients are increasingly demanding sellers demonstrate greater differentiation and deliver more value or risk being removed from approved vendor lists!
Here’s the point, to be an effective sales organization requires deeper insight into emerging market and clients’ trends in order to open new doors, gain access to decision makers, collaborate and identify new opportunities, reduce sales cycles, close more sales and improve customer experience and loyalty. The underlying IT infrastructure ; particularly, one that is... [Continue Reading]

5 reasons your IT Infrastructure may leave you asking yourself, well, how did I get here? Or, a few other annoying questions.
In a past life, long before becoming a Marketing professional, I was a DJ, spinning and mixing records to pay my way through college (yeah, records!). During this period I became a huge Talking Heads fan! The lyrics from their critically acclaimed song, “Once in a Lifetime,” often interpreted as dealing with mid-life with crisis, sacrifice and questionable choices could honestly be questions posed by many IT professionals about the state of many current IT infrastructures. Let’s queue this up.
“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”
Let’s face it; traditional infrastructures have grown increasingly complex and inflexible, making it difficult, in most cases, to be responsive to the fast changing business needs of many enterprises. Datacenter sprawl, multitudes of heterogeneous hardware platforms, hypervisors, operating systems and applications; all with their own management systems, make it difficult to address changing business requirements, get accurate insight from data, or deliver new offerings or services. It simply takes too long to manually build, set up, deliver and tear down servers, storage, network devices the old fashion way. Factor in unpredictable occurrences, like a sudden spike in traffic or transactions and, “You may ask yourself, well, how... [Continue Reading]

All software-defined strategies are not created equal and neither are the benefits!
The recent eWeek article , IBM Details Strategy for Software Defined Environments, describes the evolution of software-defined environments from their origin in software-defined networks to include the emergence of software-defined storage.
Chris Preimesberger , the eWeek author, discusses with Matt Hogstrom, CTO, IBM Software Defined Environment why all software-defined strategies and offerings are not equal and won’t deliver the same value. A software-defined environment should:
Optimize the entire computing infrastructure; not just compute, storage and network resources.
Adapt dynamically to address infrastructure issues by delivering “continuous, dynamic optimization and reconfiguration.”
Identify and capture patterns for resource deployment and associated SLAs as the target for the services the IT infrastructure will provide.
Provide an open architecture, and include open standards as OpenStack, to deliver deployment choice and flexibility, scalability and investment protection.
Support emerging, specialized workloads as Hadoop, that scale in a particular manner; or Heroku that use virtual machines which manage deployment and service placements.
The IBM Software Defined Environment strategy and approach can... [Continue Reading]

Gartner estimates: “Spending on banking and securities IT is expected to top $471 billion this year, up 14 percent from 2010, and rise by a fifth again to hit $563 billion in 2017”
The Reuter’s article, Insight: New Masters of the Universe? Banks see future in IT hires, describes the growing trend of banks hiring more, and more, IT personnel to drive the technology side of the business. The article states "With IT expertise now a must for the boardroom, banks' conservative workplaces are likely to undergo cultural change as they welcome ambitious, differently-minded people."
Leading banks like Barclays, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are hiring technical personnel in greater numbers to lead their IT operations while cutting costs in other areas of the business. Goldman Sachs is an example of the increasing emphasis being placed on IT: "Goldman Sachs has added 6 percent more IT staff since 2009, while cutting elsewhere. That has left it with 8,000 technology employees, making its department bigger than many technology firms, and it works hard to lure professionals away from Silicon Valley with the message that its technology business is key."
This trend is not confined to banking industry only. The growing impact of IT on enterprises was also documented in the IBM 2012 CEO Study, Leading Through Connections , with industry leading CEO’s ranking technology as the most important factor... [Continue Reading]